ance of his wealthy family. Awash in clichés, including popularizing the
phrase “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” the film construes
youth rebellion as a constrained set of personal issues for the elite class, and
simultaneously revises a classic woman’s genre for purposes of male famil-
ial reconciliation. The film references what Molly Haskell refers to as the
affliction sub-category of the woman’s weepy, as the heroine in this drama
dies, but recasts the genre from an explicit male perspective. The film thus
appropriates class, gender, and generational politics to offer a completely
unthreatening version of youth rebellion and generational reconciliation,
ultimately proffering a reassuring image of youth culture and campus life in
the familiar language of romantic melodrama.
As the film opens, the male lead sits alone in a snowy field, in extreme
long shot. The camera slowly zooms in to focus on him, as he poses in
voiceover the question that sets the narrative in motion: “What can you say
about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?” The film dissolves to a flash-
back that chronicles his first meeting with Jennifer at the Radcliffe library
when they were freshmen, and follows their relationship through college,
marriage, financial struggles while he is in law school, her diagnosis of can-
cer, and her death. The film ends in the same field, as the strains of the
theme music well up on the sound track and the camera zooms out. The
whole story is thus implicitly told from Oliver’s point of view, after Jen-
nifer’s death. The story of love and loss is his story.
When Jennifer and Oliver first meet, she immediately pegs him as a
“preppy” and says he looks “stupid and rich.” Clinching his close connec-
tion to the Harvard establishment, she learns that his family name graces
one of the university buildings, named for his great-grandfather, a benefac-
tor. His family has always been educated at Harvard, and like his father
before him, Oliver plays on the university hockey team. Yet Oliver is
unhappy with the weight of his family heritage, its burden of expectations,
and the sterile formality that characterizes his relationship with his parents.
Despite his expressed dissatisfaction, Oliver is fully endowed with the priv-
ileges of his status and manages to fulfill the expectations that come with
being a Barrett. By contrast, Jennifer is a talented scholarship student
working her way through school. As if to confirm her working-class, white
ethnic identity, her relationship with her widowed father is comfortable,
warm, and earthy. While Oliver addresses his father as “sir,” she calls her
father by his first name, and openly declares her love for him on the phone.
Her intellectual credentials are clinched by her love of classical music, espe-
cially Mozart, which is prominently featured on the sound track in contrast
to the rock and folk music of most campus films of the year.
1970 — MOVIES AND THE MOVEMENT 35